Housing Justice & Homelessness

The mission of LA Forward’s Housing Justice team is to ensure that every person in Los Angeles has access to safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently-affordable housing. While there are many organizations in Los Angeles fighting for specific areas of Housing Justice, we choose to holistically address equitable and affordable housing from a “yes, and,” multi-pronged perspective when fighting for legislation. We focus on solidarity with communities historically impacted by institutionalized racism, segregation, and disinvestment. We support a Homes Guarantee nationally and locally.

Want to get involved in this kind of work? Sign up for our Housing Justice Action Team.

Our Principles:

  • Protect renters & low-income homeowners: We must strengthen renters’ rights and eliminate loopholes that unscrupulous landlords frequently exploit to drive up rents, harass & unjustly evict tenants, and remove affordable units from the market.

  • Prevent people from being displaced: We support the empowerment of racially & economically marginalized communities to shape the planning of the neighborhoods they inhabit. We must remove the speculation that places housing’s value as a commodity above its value as a home.

  • Preserve existing affordable housing: We must institute programs that prioritize Tenant and Community Opportunity to Purchase, disincentivize the corporate redevelopment of existing multifamily housing, and use government resources to permanently extend affordability for units whose convents are expiring.

  • Produce new permanently affordable housing in every neighborhood: We must focus on the creation of, and conversion to, non-commodified types of housing, including Community Land Trusts and Social Housing. We must produce more housing overall, but we need to create new units at the lower-end of the market. For far too long, production has been mostly expensive and located in working class areas.

  • Permanently house people experiencing homelessness: We need services and supportive housing in every community and to fight against the criminalization of our unhoused neighbors.

A few of the housing justice coalitions we work with

Resources

Teach In - Social Housing 101

Teach In - Path to Housing Stability & Justice - August 2020

Tenant Protections Teach In - September 2020

Featuring Carla De Paz, the director of Community Power Collective, Katie McKeon, an attorney with Public Counsel, and Francisco Dueñas, the director of Housing Now, California’s leading housing justice coalition.

This session explored how the process of guiding public investment in transit lines, open space, and elsewhere can be attentive and responsive to concerns regarding housing affordability, speculative investment, and potential displacement. Featuring panelists Mariana Huerta Jones (ACT-LA), Irma Muñoz (Mujeres de la Tierra), and Tafarai Bayne and Jason Foster (Destination Crenshaw), with facilitator David Levitus (LA Forward)

A majority of our budget comes from our members’ monthly donations. In 2024, our goal is to raise 70% of our budget from dues-paying members. That will enable us to be 100% accountable to people like you. Your gift allows us to respond rapidly to emerging issues, to take on powerful interests, and spend as little time possible on fundraising so we can focus on the crucial work that needs to get done every day.